How the Week Divides
SPIE Photonics West 2027 opens on Saturday 30 January and closes on Thursday 4 February. Conferences and courses run across all six days.
Two exhibitions split the week. BiOS Expo takes the weekend of 30 and 31 January. The Photonics West Exhibition takes Tuesday 2 to Thursday 4 February. Monday 1 February carries the conference programme with no show floor.
What the Programme Carries
SPIE advertises 100+ conferences across six major application areas. The six are AR | VR | MR, BiOS, the Embedded Vision Summit, LASE, OPTO and Quantum West.
The society offers 60 courses in San Francisco that week. The topics run across basic optics, AR and VR, photonic chips and quantum.
The industry programme runs on five stages. The SPIE Prism Awards sit on 3 February, and the Startup Challenge and the three-day Quantum West Business Summit fall inside the same week.
SPIE counts 24,000 people at the meeting and more than 30 plenary speakers. More than 1,200 companies exhibit across the two shows.
The Monday in the Middle
The SPIE Global Business Forum runs on Monday 1 February at the San Francisco Marriott Marquis, 780 Mission Street. The forum takes its own registration, which opened.
The forum's attend page states that a forum attendee can also attend all exhibitions that are part of Photonics West. The Monday ticket therefore carries the exhibition days either side of it.
Arrival Nights and the Walk
A Saturday 30 January arrival gives five nights to a Thursday 4 February checkout. A Friday 29 January arrival gives six nights.
The venue counts more than 20,000 hotel rooms within walking distance of the Moscone Center. More than two-thirds of the city's 34,000 rooms sit inside that radius.
The housing file's selectable nights run Saturday 23 January to Tuesday 9 February 2027. Both arrival patterns sit inside them.
Booking Order and the Cost Basis
ConferenceDirect holds the housing file. Its website closes on Monday 25 January 2027, and hotel closing dates vary by property.
The bureau charges a $50 cancellation fee for room cancellations made at any time, and cancellations made directly with the hotel carry the same fee. Ask each property for its own window before choosing inventory.
Engine measures the San Francisco average at $165 a night across 3.1 million public rate observations from May 2024 to April 2026. January and February both price at $166.
Five nights at $166 comes to $830, and six nights to $996. The American Hotel and Lodging Association, citing an Oxford Economics study of 25 June 2026, measures citywide visitor spending at about $900 for each room night, which is $5,400 across six nights.
Book the floor days first. BiOS opens on the Saturday morning ahead of the main exhibition, so the arrival night follows whichever opening a delegate intends to attend.